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Bright Lights That Mask the Darkness

Maybe Mao Zedong, that wordsmith, would have come up with a nifty aphorism for the occasion, something snappy like “Let a hundred light-emitting diodes bloom” or “Power grows out of the barrel of a floodlight.”

Not that China’s modern leaders needed, or wanted, thoughts from the chairman to highlight the public relations coup handed to them by managers of the Empire State Building. On Wednesday and Thursday nights, the top of the Empire State was bathed in red and yellow, the colors of the Chinese flag. It was a tacit tribute to the regime in Beijing.

The nighttime lights on the city’s most famous building are a source of pleasure for New Yorkers but also cause for occasional head-scratching. What was with all the green two Sundays ago? That was for the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr. And the yellow the weekend before that? A nod to the United States Open tennis tournament.

A look at the Empire State’s lighting schedule for the last year shows that honors for individual countries are not routine. Even celebrations rooted in national pride are more about Americans with origins in certain countries than about the countries themselves.

So the tribute to Beijing stood out. Officially, it was described as commemorating the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Looked at another way, it honored the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, which in the past caused millions of deaths and whose standard-bearers are serial human rights offenders. In its most recent report on human rights around the world, covering 2008, the State Department said that China’s record “remained poor and worsened in some areas.” Extrajudicial killings, torture, repression of ethnic minorities and imprisonment of dissidents were but a few of the abuses cited.

Yes, the United States has sins of its own to atone for. Yes, we’re only talking about lights on a building. Call us symbol-minded, if you want. But foreign policy statements are made all the time on and above the sidewalks of New York. That explains why street corners are named for the likes of Nelson and Winnie Mandela of South Africa, the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, the murdered Kudirat Abiola of Nigeria and the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue.

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“This anniversary has been accompanied by massive human rights abuses,” with tightened government controls choking off possible dissent, said Sharon K. Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China. A similar point was made in a letter sent to the building’s managers by Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch. The objection is not to honoring China or its people, Ms. Bogert said. But this tribute, she said, celebrates a decades-long Communist rule that is “responsible historically for many grave violations of human rights.”

Some Tibetans in New York and their supporters were also unhappy. Wednesday morning, about 20 of them stood outside the Empire State’s Fifth Avenue entrance denouncing the bow to a regime that has harshly occupied Tibet for decades. “Mao’s Empire State Building,” read one of their signs.

“Whoever came up with this idea is just promoting Communism with this symbol of democracy lit in red lights,” said one protester, Ngawang Palden.

AS he spoke, a lighting ceremony was held in the Empire State’s lobby. “This is really a great gesture,” Peng Keyu, China’s consul general in New York, told Joseph Bellina, the building’s general manager. Mr. Bellina called the lights “a symbol of unity between our countries and our peoples.”

Mr. Peng also said that in the post-Mao era, China has followed “opening-up policies.”

The same could not be said about the Empire State Building management. Requests for details about the tribute, including possible financial arrangements with China, went unanswered except for a boilerplate statement that the building “celebrates many cultures and causes in the world community with iconic lightings.”

The reticence perhaps suggested discomfort with a move that some New Yorkers deemed a blunder. Mao, as usual, had something to say on that score. “Once a mistake is made, we should correct it,” he wrote 60 years ago, “and the more quickly and thoroughly the better.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2009, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Bright Lights That Mask The Darkness. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe